Palantir, Nvidia & Tempus AI: The Future of Medicine in 2025

Palantir, Nvidia, and Tempus AI are emerging as darlings in the pharma ETF landscape, focusing on real-time data integration, genomics-driven diagnostics, and AI-powered drug discovery. These companies are revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry, but their exposure in ETFs remains limited. The Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund and iShares U.S. Pharmaceuticals ETF still heavily rely on traditional pharmaceutical companies, while few thematic funds, such as ARK Genomic Revolution ETF, have invested in AI-native biotech.

AI disruptors like Palantir, Tempus, and Recursion are reshaping drug discovery, yet remain largely absent from major healthcare ETFs. With Big Pharma stagnating, ETF issuers may need to look at AI-native biotech to stay relevant in the next wave of healthcare innovation.

Palantir Technologies (PLTR), Tempus AI (TEM), and Recursion Pharmaceuticals (RXRX) are leading the charge in real-time data integration, genomics-driven diagnostics, and AI-powered drug discovery. These companies are revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry, but their exposure in ETFs remains limited. The Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLV) and iShares U.S. Pharmaceuticals ETF (IHE) still heavily rely on traditional pharmaceutical companies, while few thematic funds, such as the ARK Genomic Revolution ETF (ARKG), have invested in AI-native biotech.

Palantir has shown a phenomenal YTD performance and is quietly establishing itself as the digital scaffolding for hospital systems and military-grade medical planning. Tempus AI has remained firm at around $64, indicating market faith in its capability to use AI to industrialize cancer diagnosis. Recursion Pharmaceuticals has been up 15% since late June, while remaining in loss for the year, a classic biotech early-stage pattern, but now infused with algorithmic drug discovery.

NVIDIA (NVDA), whose chips reside at the center of Recursion’s wet-lab-meets-silicon-brain hybrid model, remains the underlying facilitator of this whole thing. Meanwhile, traditional pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer (PFE) and Merck (MRK) are not exactly the material for breakout tales.

The ETF opportunity is clear. Conventional drugmakers still control manufacturing, regulation, and distribution, but AI-first companies are beginning to own the upstream, the concepts, the iterations, the trial designs. Speed and accuracy are no longer niceties — they’re necessities.

ETF providers now have a choice. Are they going to keep tracking yesterday’s winners in healthcare, or pre-emptively shift portfolios towards the players really shaping tomorrow’s innovation? There is an open invitation here to innovating. A specially designed “AI & Next-Gen Healthcare ETF” that combines genomics-based diagnostics, machine learning-assisted discovery, and healthtech infrastructure could grab the very growth that conventional pharma ETFs are not seeing.

Palantir, Tempus AI, and Recursion are not merely healthcare-adjacent technology companies. They’re the leading edge of a very lucrative spear — one that already has pieced biotech’s old armor. And although Big Pharma is still, well, pharma, it’s the AI-born upstarts who are flexing the future.

The ETF business might need to begin paying attention, because the actual biotech bull cycle may not be occurring in corner offices, but in server racks, sequencing labs, and real-time data dashboards.

References:
[1] https://www.benzinga.com/etfs/sector-etfs/25/07/46648142/palantir-nvidia-tempus-ai-could-be-pharma-etf-darlings-that-dont-make-pills